World

Stop the genocide!

28/11/2023 admin 0

The members of the working group Perifèries Urbanes of the Catalan Institute of Anthropology (ICA) express their deepest solidarity with the Palestinian people, suffering 75 years of illegal colonialism by the state of Israel, and request all Catalan and European academic institution to suspend their collaboration with Israeli universities, until the end of the indiscriminate bombing over Gaza, of the invasion of Palestinian land, of the islamophobic and colonial persecution, of the apartheid regime within the state of Israel, and of the zionist project of ethnic supremacy fed by the extreme right, by the weapon industry, and by global financial capitalism, in violation of human rights, of democratic legitimacy, and of tens of UN resolutions.


Request from the Anthropology department of the University of Barcelona, to suspend academic relations with Israeli institutions: https://x.com/DepAntroUB/status/1724135664508092866?s=20

Declaration of the European Association of Social Anthropology (EASA): https://easaonline.org/outputs/support/gaza1023.shtml

Declaration of the Middle East Section of the (North)American Anthropology Association (AAA): https://mes.americananthro.org/2023/10/20/mes-amea-joint-statement-on-palestine-israel-october-2023/

Declaration of the North American Anthropology Association (AAA): https://americananthro.org/news/aaa-membership-endorses-academic-boycott-resolution/…

Criminalization of the housing movement in Brazil

25/07/2019 admin 0

Last June 24th four activists for housing were arrested in São Paulo, Brasil, while seventeen others linked to the movement for squatting were put under arrest; fifteen more are threatened of detention. The arbitrariousness of the operation is another signal of the steady drift towards fascism of the state of Brazil, that is, the complete subjugation of public institutions to the interest of big landowners and investors.

The activists were members of housing movements that squatted and returned to the common huge buildings in central São Paulo; they were accused of  criminal association and extortion, something that was also employed in other countries to criminalize squatting, but not yet in Brazil. For their defense, a new organization was created: the “Popular committee in defense of political prisoners and  popular movements“, whose members are activists, worker union members, artists, journalists, lawyers and other people concerned by the criminalization of social struggles.

Given the  previous cases of extreme repression perpetrated by Brazilian authorities against social movements, that include extrajudiciary killings such as Marielle Franco‘s death in March 2018, it is extremely important that all people concerned to the right to housing and to the city in all the world mobilize to denounce these arrests, to claim liberty for the prisoners, and the end of arbitrary persecutions against activists.

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War and gentrification in Kurdistan

17/10/2016 admin 0
War and urban renewal mingle in south-eastern Turkey, where the government wages its war against the kurdish movement also through the demolition of traditional neighborhoods and the displacement of residents in huge public-housing blocks.

City Life Vida Urbana: How evicted turn into activists

23/03/2016 admin 0
Boston has today the highest income divide of the US: evictions invariably hit latinos or afroamerican neighborhoods. City Life / Vida Urbana since the 1970s keeps building a network of mutual aid among those who suffer the consequences of these housing policies, also through the use of theater, rituals, symbols.

Life in the ruins of old Nanjing

30/10/2015 admin 0
The anthropologist Ye LIN invites us to look at the demolition of a neighborhood in Nanjing - very near to the spot in where the Youth Olympic Games were held in 2014. Ye studies the impact on the residents of the whole process, also highlighting how our idea of "community" influences the way we judge this kind of interventions.

El Haouma, that is, the neighborhood

09/06/2015 admin 0
What happened to these young men that were so celebrated in 2011, the main actors of the so-called 'arab springs'? In recent years we only hear news about politicians, leaders, terrorists... but what about normal people, where have they been? The answer is simple: in their neighborhoods. In Hay Hlil, in Oukacha, in Hezbet el Haggana, where there is the same anger and frustration that there was before the protests.

Sydney, a (post)colonial city

22/11/2014 admin 0
On the occasion of the opening of "Australian 'Ndrangheta", webpage of a UCL research group of which our friend Stephen BENNETTS is a member, we propose a series of interesting videos and texts from the other corner of the world, on topics such as the expulsions of Aboriginese from native lands and urban neighborhood as Sydney's Redfern.

Root shock: how the destruction of black communities hurt the US

01/04/2014 admin 0
Mindy Fullilove calls "root shock" the trauma suffered by 1600 Afro-American communities displaced from the city centres of the US since 1949. In her book "Root Shock" (2004) she uses the metaphor of transplantation, a trauma after which, if repeated, many plants can't recover. Even the transition from the pleasure of jazz, born in the old ghettos, to the anger of rap, product of the new peripheries, is a manifestation of root shock; it is a trauma for those who suffer it, and for society as a whole.

Unlearning the colonial roots of planning

28/12/2013 admin 0
We have been long aware that urban planning, in itself, has something to do with colonialism. But we hadn't still found a perspective so complete as the one developed by the Australian urbanist Libby PORTER, who studies urban planning as an instrument for spatial exclusion of the aboriginal population: urbanism as a complement and continuation of colonization.